Christianity and Culture in the Middle Ages

The career of John Van Engen is honoured in this interesting volume of essays edited by David C. Mengel and Lisa Wolverton. Van Engen is known to specialists working on several distinct areas of later medieval religious history, but there are probably few who could range as widely as he does himself. The essays here represent that range, from twelfth-century religious writings and Jewish–Christian relations to late medieval culture and gender. Van Engen himself is perhaps best known through two influential articles: ‘The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem’, published in the American Historical Review in 1986, and ‘Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church’, published in Church History in 2008. Both articles take a very imaginative and open-ended approach to historical questions concerning medieval religion, a field in which stamp-collecting and antiquarianism are rife, and this spirit has thankfully been taken up by many of the contributors to this volume. But of course, being imaginative is not at all antithetical to technical ability in the skills of the medievalist, as Van Engen’s work has consistently shown

Ancient history · Archaeology · Christianity · Fifteenth · Historiography · History of religions · Honor · Judaism · Medieval history · Medieval studies · Middle Ages · Theology · Classics · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies · Religious Studies